Think back and imagine 247 years ago. Debenhams was founded 11 years before America's first president, 24 years before electric lighting, 205 years before the birth of the internet. It's all down to William Debenham, who pioneered multi-branded retailing, the first person anywhere in the world to put different brands in a single store.
I grew up with Debenhams all over the high street.
The Debenhams Group and the Debenhams chain really were looking at the social history of the whole of the U.K.
Over those 247 years, it became an iconic British brand.
This just came into Debenhams?
India Debenhams at 12:00 P.M.
I can buy Debenhams.
Found him wandering around Debenhams on his own.
What?
We're going to Debenhams.
Debenhams has, even today, almost 100% brand recognition. Everybody knows Debenhams. Almost everybody has a story to tell about Debenhams.
My earliest memory of Debenhams is going over to the hats department.
My first mascara, my first perfume in Debenhams.
We are the new Debenhams, bigger, better, bolder than ever before.
Debenhams, do not miss. They hit every single time.
Last year, we took 10 influencers to Paris for the week.
I'm here in Paris with Debenhams.
I was actually so amazed.
Two of our favorite campaigns that we've done with you guys have been, first of all, the racing. It was the Taylor Swift Eras Tour with Debenhams.
Debenhams today is really about transformation.
It's now moved onto a digital platform and offering a lot more to its customers.
I'm grateful that it's still here online.
With it being online, it's so much more convenient. You can get everything you need.
Where do I purchase my product? Debenhams.
I got my braids made first. Oh, it's so swell.
Get ready. Everything is changing.
Tranquility Base is the Eagle has landed. Rocket 20 Tranquility, we got you on the ground.
A new name, a bold vision. The next era begins. This isn't just the beginning. It's a new dawn taking flight. Welcome to Debenhams Group. We have incredible brands. PrettyLittleThing, the global fashion phenomenon. Boohoo, the original online fashion disruptor. Karen Millen, an amazing brand. Partnering with iconic brand ambassadors like Elle Macpherson and Liz Hurley. boohoo MAN, our digital menswear disruptor. Debenhams, Britain's leading online department store. As we go forward as Debenhams Group, we reposition ourselves with a new mission to connect our community with brands they love. A new vision. Fashion, beauty, lifestyle for everyone. A new set of values. Be brave. Be creative. Be a community. Our transformation and turnaround of Debenhams is the blueprint for our transformation and turnaround of our wider group. Debenhams is back. Good morning. My name's Dan Finley. I'm the Chief Executive of Debenhams Group.
Day 130 in role. Excitingly, today is day one of our new beginnings as we go forward as Debenhams Group. Debenhams is back. The two things that I want to talk to you about today, firstly, to provide a deep dive into our Debenhams business, and secondly, to share my vision for our future going forwards. Debenhams has a very proud history, and I'm privileged to be part of that. 247 years ago, Debenhams was founded in 1778. That's 11 years before America's first president. That's 24 years before the discovery of electric lighting. It's 108 years before the invention of the motor car. It's 205 years before the birth of the internet. We have William Debenham to thank for this. He was a pioneer. The pioneer of multi-branded retailing. The pioneer of the department store concept. The pioneer of the British high street.
Ultimately, what William Debenham founded became an iconic, much-loved British heritage brand. Difficult times fell upon Debenhams, and it was time for change. New beginnings with new ownership, new leadership, and new vision. Our new Debenhams is bigger, better, and bolder. Today, we are Debenhams, Britain's online department store. Let me share with you a little bit more about my vision and philosophy as I approach the Debenhams opportunity. I want Debenhams to be to retail what Spotify is to music. I want to offer the consumer ultimate choice and the ultimate selection. I want to do that in a curated and personalised way that makes us the go-to destination for our consumer. I'm delighted today that our Debenhams ecosystem has more than 15,000 brands in it, and it's growing every single day. We're proud to work with such a brilliant selection of brands.
Yves Saint Laurent, Estée Lauder, Clarins, Calvin Klein, Hugo Boss, Gant, Altra, Castore, Valentino. We add more brands to our portfolio every single day. Let me share a little more about our approach. We are principally a marketplace model. That means that we are stockless. Our marketplace business, we take no inventory risk on. The responsibility for buying, storing, picking, and packing the products that we sell through our marketplace business rests with our partner. The attractiveness of the economics of the marketplace model is that we earn 100% gross margin on each marketplace product that we sell. The model is working capital positive as we receive the monies from our consumer a number of weeks before we have to remit those monies, minus our commission, to our partners. I believe in what I call collaborative commerce.
We bring millions of consumers together with thousands of partners through our Debenhams platform. Our partners and we at Debenhams are focused on delighting our customers. We want to showcase our partner brands at their very best. By delighting our customers, showcasing the great brands and products of our partners, we drive sales through our Debenhams platform, which is a win for the consumer, a win for our partner, and ultimately a win for Debenhams. This collaborative commerce approach is working very well with our consumers and exceptionally well with our partners. Ultimately, we want to deliver growth to our partners. In a challenging economic environment, in a challenging retail environment, Debenhams delivers growth for our partners.
That growth is in excess of 50% over the course of the last 12 months when I look at our partners that have been trading on the platform for over 24 months. An exceptional level of growth in a challenging retail environment, which makes Debenhams an attractive destination both for consumers and partners. Of course, Debenhams is home to much-loved and well-known labels that have been acquired by the group: Coast, Wallis, Missp ap, Dorothy Perkins, Principles, Nasty Gal, Oasis, Warehouse, and Burton. Brands that our consumers love and that we have rescued, turned around, and bring to our consumer every single day through our debenhams.com platform, through our direct-to-consumer websites, and through the partners that we sell our brands through too. Ultimately, we're about delivering results. Debenhams is a high-growth business.
In FY 2025, Debenhams generated GBP 654 million of GMV in a challenging economic and retail environment. That is a 43% increase on FY 2024, which builds on a 63% increase on FY 2023 and a 113% increase on FY 2022. This has been a multi-year turnaround at Debenhams. EBITDA of GBP 25 million in FY 2025 is a significant transformation from the circa GBP 15 million losses that I inherited in FY 2022. I'm pleased to report very strong EBITDA margins in our Debenhams business. If I look at our marketplace, the EBITDA margin in FY 2025 is 27%.
If I look in our fashion business, the collection of much-loved labels that have now been incorporated into Debenhams, they have been turned around, the losses have been stopped, and they now make a 7% EBITDA margin. Our Debenhams business model is capital light. When I look at our Capex spend in FY 2025, it was just GBP 1.2 million.
Debenhams is highly cash-generative. Our operating cash flows reached GBP 40 million in FY 2025, a significant improvement on minus GBP 23 million in FY 2022. The marketplace-led business model generates significant cash. What is most exciting about Debenhams is not the progress that we have made over the last few years, but the incredible and significant opportunities that I believe lie ahead. The flywheel is such an incredible opportunity for Debenhams as the network effects begin to take effect. We offer more choice to our consumers by bringing more partners and more brands into the ecosystem.
That greater choice attracts more and more consumers to the Debenhams platform. More brands and better brands with more consumers and more frequent consumers combine to drive greater sales and greater growth. Those greater sales and higher rates of growth for our brands and partners, in turn, attract more brands and partners into our ecosystem.
I'm super excited about the opportunities ahead. We launched retail media on Debenhams this year. It's an incredible opportunity whereby we generate significant margins by selling advertising and media services through our Debenhams ecosystem to our brands, partners, and select third parties. I'm delighted with the adoption of our retail media solution through our partner network and encouraged by the early results and successes that we have seen. I believe that retail media through our Debenhams platform will be a significant contributor to our future profitability. Delivered by Debenhams leverages our state-of-the-art fulfillment center in Sheffield. It enables us to store, pick, pack, and deliver products from our brands and partners, leveraging the significant investment that we've made in a state-of-the-art and best-in-class distribution center. We make a margin on every product that we handle.
I'm delighted that we've gone live this week with our first partner for Delivered and Fulfilled by Debenhams. I'm delighted to announce today the launch of Debenhams PayPlus, our financial services business. We believe that is highly complementary to our online department store model and is a significant potential profitability driver as we move forward. We see an opportunity to offer more choice to our consumers in how they pay on Debenhams. In turn, we can invest expected financial services income in pricing, promotion, and our consumer proposition to drive greater order frequency and higher lifetime value for our Debenhams consumers. There is a huge opportunity with Debenhams to drive greater consideration. Debenhams benefits from huge brand awareness. The real opportunity is in doubling the consideration and 10xing the intention to buy rates.
If I look at the levels of consideration and intention to buy that our competitor sets achieve, we have significant headroom for growth to drive more consumers into the Debenhams ecosystem. Debenhams is perhaps most famous for Designers at Debenhams. It was the inventor of designer collaborations, the pioneer, some might say, of influencer marketing. Designers at Debenhams was much loved by the British consumer. I'm delighted to announce that this autumn-winter, Designers at Debenhams is back. I see significant new partnership opportunities for our brands as we extend the presence of our brands beyond the Debenhams and group ecosystem and sell on more platforms, on more marketplaces, in more retail destinations across the world. To recap, at Debenhams, we've seen a highly successful multi-year turnaround. We've proven out a new business model as we've transformed an iconic British heritage brand. I see huge opportunity ahead for Debenhams.
In Debenhams, we have a success blueprint that can be applied to the turnaround of the rest of our group. The ingredients of this blueprint are an experienced team, a highly attractive business model, proprietary technology that underpins our business model, proven economics, and high double-digit EBITDA margins, and frankly, unlimited opportunity. I'm super proud of the journey that we've been on at Debenhams. Now we start our new beginnings. We've undertaken significant change since the 1st of November when I was appointed CEO. We've appointed a new non-executive chairman in Tim Morris, who has more than 25 years of retail and operating experience. Now it's time for us to leverage the Debenhams success blueprint and roll that out to aid the turnaround of the rest of our group.
Today, I'm delighted that we've announced the rebirth of our group as Debenhams Group, a marketplace-led business that leverages our proven Debenhams model and that is powered by our proprietary Debenhams technology. We have a new mission to connect our community with brands they love. A new vision: fashion, beauty, lifestyle for everyone. A new set of values: be brave, be creative, be a community. As we go forward as Debenhams Group, we'll be announcing in the coming weeks and months a new set of ESG commitments that underpin our group going forwards. Ahead of this, I'm delighted to announce four new partnerships today with Segura, the global leaders in supply chain visibility, as we build on the progress that we've made in recent years, but go even further to provide transparency in our end-to-end supply chain.
With Pennies, the micro-donation services, as we enable our consumers and we as a business and our partners to make a significant contribution to social change. With the Carbon Trust to develop a robust net-zero transition plan. With the Graduate Fashion Foundation to invest in future fashion talent in the United Kingdom. As I look forward, I'm incredibly excited by the opportunities that I see ahead and laser-focused on creating value for all shareholders. I see an exciting medium-term opportunity. Debenhams, the online department store, in the medium term is a multi-billion-pound GMV business with a circa 20% EBITDA margin. Karen Millen is a global lifestyle brand that can achieve double-digit EBITDA margins. Our youth brands become fashion-led marketplaces with high single-digit EBITDA margins. Debenhams is back. I'm really proud of the progress that we've made turning around Debenhams.
Boohoo Group is sharply focused on creating value for all shareholders. I look forward to updating you all on the journey ahead. Finally, I'd like to thank our colleagues around the world for all of the great work, help, and support in our ongoing transformation.